Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He who does not speak foreign languages knows nothing about his own.

Very often when we have found ourselves forever separated from what we had intended to achieve, we have already, on our way, found something else worth desiring.

Association with women is the basic element of good manners.

I am indeed but a wanderer, a pilgrim on earth. But are you anything more?

Translators are like busy match-makers: they sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty, and extol her charms, and arouse an irresistible longing for the original.

Hypotheses are scaffoldings erected in front of a building and then dismantled when the building is finished. They are indispensable for the workman; but you mustn't mistake the scaffolding for the building.

A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.

A thinking man's greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed.

You often say to yourself in the course of your life that you ought to avoid having too much business, 'polypragmosyne' [incessant activity], and, more especially, that the older you get, the more you ought to avoid entering on new business. But it's all very well saying this, and giving yourself andothers good advice. The very fact of growing older means taking up a new business; all our circumstances change, and we must either stop doing anything at all or else willing and consciously take on the new role we have to play on life's stage.

Everything that liberates our mind without at the same time imparting self-control is pernicious.

Behaviour is a mirror in which everyone shows his image.

The first and last thing demanded of genius is love of truth.